Legislation that would require social media platforms to implement policies to prevent certain harms to minors was advanced Thursday by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, with 17 other bills centered on children’s safety online.
The harm-prevention bill, dubbed the Kids’ Online Safety Act, is a new version of legislation that the full committee forwarded last Congress, but leaves out a duty of care mandate for platforms and applies to a narrower list of possible harms to children online.
Subcommittee Chair Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., sponsored this year’s version, which he said would be the “foundation and the safety net” and would work together with other safety bills before the subcommittee.
“KOSA will broadly protect kids and teens,” he said, “while the other bills before us address particular harms or take specific approaches to help ensure no existing threat is left unaddressed.”
At a legislative hearing on the bills last week, Bilirakis defended the removal of the duty of care provision in his version of the bill as “mindful” of court challenges to similar state laws based on free speech concerns.
“Laws with good intentions have been struck down for violating the First Amendment,” he said at the hearing. “We are learning from those experiences, because a law that gets struck down in court does not protect a child.”
Democrats on the panel said Thursday they were disappointed with the new bill and preferred the bipartisan version that came through the committee last year.
The ranking member of the full committee, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., specifically objected to the bill’s lower knowledge standard for smaller platforms to know a user is a minor and to broad preemption of related state laws.
“This bill therefore needs more work and I can’t support it in its current form, but my ‘no’ vote does not mean that we will not continue to work to find a path on this bill and others,” he said, going on to add: “Kids’ safety is too important to get it wrong.”
The bill was forwarded to the full committee on a party line vote of 13-10.
Other bills advanced Thursday would seek to address risks on gaming platforms and through ephemeral messaging. Discussions over many of the bills centered on the balance between parental oversight and ensuring safety for kids in unsupportive or abusive households, as well as on preemption of state laws.
Democrats also raised objections to a bill that would update privacy standards for kids under the 1998-era law known as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act as too friendly to Big Tech because it also includes a preemption of all state laws related to the bill’s provisions.
Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., said the version of so-called COPPA 2.0 before the committee, titled the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, went against bipartisan work the committee previously did on the issue, as well as work done by states to protect children’s privacy.
“You are going to preempt not only children’s privacy laws, but you could also preempt other consumer protection and tort claim laws. You could pull the rug out from under many . . . lawsuits right now that are going on to hold tech companies accountable,” she said.
Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., co-sponsored the bill and said preemption would standardize protections and address the patchwork of differing state laws that have arisen since Congress passed COPPA in the 1990s.
“A child’s level of protection should not depend on their zip code,” Lee said.
She also said the bill is meant to respond to the realities of the modern internet, including mental health risks for kids.
The privacy protection bill was forwarded to the full committee on a party-line vote of 14-10. The other 16 bills the subcommittee forwarded moved with bipartisan support by voice vote.
App stores
The committee spent considerable time debating a bill that was not included in the markup. It would require phone operating systems to allow for the use of third-party app stores.
Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., said the bill, which she sponsored, would allow parents greater control over what apps are available to their children, thereby solving some of the problems other bills on the slate would attempt to address. She also implied that the bill, titled the App Store Freedom Act, was not included in the markup due to opposition from tech companies.
Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., a co-sponsor of the bill, asked the chair of the full committee, Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., to commit to a markup of the bill, but he did not.
Guthrie acknowledged a meeting with a representative from Apple, reportedly CEO Tim Cook, on Wednesday, but said the markup agenda was set before that meeting and that the agenda did include another bill opposed by Apple.
He also said the meeting gave him hope that greater age verification and parental control is possible for app stores and that compromise legislation could be reached.
Among the bills forwarded Thursday is one to require app stores to verify users’ ages and require accounts for minors to be associated with a parental account, dubbed the App Store Accountability Act.
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